On With The Show! The Farm That Mac Built by Tammi Sauer

There's no business like show business!

And when a cast of the usual farm animals decide to put on a barn show, Scarecrow the empressario puts together a troup of Vaudeville wannabes all ready to wow their audience.

A couple of hens with flashlights flap up to the rafters to provide the stage lighting, the curtains open, and the pigs sashay out with their top hats and canes and begin to do the old soft shoe. But the tap of their trotters is followed by waltzing cows in ballroom gowns...

THAT LIVE ON THE FARM THAT JACK BUILT!

and NOW...

... MONKEYS!?

Oh, dear! These don't belong on the farm!

Emcee Scarecrow shoos the monkeys offstage in time for the next scheduled act--Sheep That Leap--but their dance is interrupted by break-dancing...

KANGAROOS?

And scarcely has the next scheduled act, the horse (NEIGH!) begun his one-man-band gig with a concertina jig when a pair of Viking elephants give the rest a scare. The cast scatters to hide behind the scenery until...

... a troup of hatching eggs jiggle out and with a chorus of cracks, out comes a brood of baby...

PENGUINS?

But the show must go on! That's show biz at Old Mac's Farm, in Tammi Sauer's latest, The Farm That Mac Built, a comical mashup of two nursery songs, "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" and "This Is the House that Jack Built" that combines zoo animals and farm animals in one of the whackiest casts that ever trod the boards together. With funny illustrations by author-illustrator Jackie Urbanavic (creator of the hilarious Duck at the Door (Max the Duck) series) (see my reviews here) this is one fractured folksong production that breaks the mold! Says School Library Journal, "Lots of word repetition and animal sound effects, combined with Urbanovic’s comically expressive cartoon illustrations, make this a rollicking read-aloud."

The Play's The Thing! Night Play: A Bedtime Story in Three Acts by Lizi Boyd

Little Arlo is already attired in his stripey pajamas and paper nightcap and is ready to head for bed. But his toy bedtime buddies are not!

"I'm so sleepy. Just one more play and off to bed." Arlo says.

"Oh, yay!" says Bunny.

"Hooray!" says Cat

"Yippee!" says 'Coon.

"Starring Arlo and Friends!" announces Bird.

It's ACT I. The curtain is pulled back, revealing a backdrop of a lake with sailboats and a small island in the center. Arlo's menagerie of stuffed animals get to work as stagehands and impromptu actors. Oars for the sailboat are located, and Bird scouts out the wind, but it seems their little audience, Arlo, is already dozing.

"Let him sleep! We'll do Act II!"

The curtain opens again upon a medieval scene, as Cat hands out the costumes, but rest of cast finds their knightly stage garb too itchy, too heavy, and too hard to see out of. The production seems to falling apart. Sets get haphazardly switched, with grumpy actors going off-script and getting downright rowdy.

At last, Arlo wakes up and takes charge of the production. The cast of characters fall in line and follow the director. The show must go on, and together they complete the play.

And in a dramatic final sweep of the curtain comes ACT III...

All sail away...

And cast and crew and Arlo, too, sail off to dreamland at last, in Lizi Boyd's latest, Night Play (Chronicle Books, 2018). Ever since Wynken and Blynken and Nod sailed off one night into a sea of dew, kids have been drifting off to dreamland with a bedtime story, and this beddie-bye tale showing toys and little sleeper Arlo cooperating to create their own backdrops (presumably painted by the stage crew between pages) allows them to perform the roles in their own play.

Youngsters will love artist Boyd's text, with plenty of speech balloons delivered by the plushy performers, as well as her skillful manipulation of the toy-and-movable format which uses die-cut pages to provide the opening and closing stage curtain between scenes. It's a novel bedtime story, concluding in a showstopper of a double-page gatefold as the performers, their night play over, take their bows and toddle offstage to bed. This book is something of a tour-de-force for Lizi Boyd, whose earlier sleeping-out bedtime tale, Flashlight, similar in style if not in palette, was a hit in its clever use of black and white contrasts. (see review here).